One L (1977)

by Scott Turow

  In consequence, I spent much of my time in early January bent over various commercial outlines doing a lot of straight memorization of rules. It was dull, unrewarding work and there was no way around it. Although I would have all the books beside me when I took the exams, time would be far too short to be looking things up then.

  After I'd more or less learned by heart the rules in a subject area, I'd go back to my class notes and try to digest the specific policy rationales for the rules. Then, as Zechman had advised, I'd see if I could relate those ideas to the broadest thematic concerns of each course. Holding all of it together in my mind was something of a feat. When I was a kid I saw a TV show about some U. S. soldier who kept himself sane in a Korean prison by designing a house in his head. Learning a law course is much the same kind of process: putting up the struts, the walls, the roof; rule/policy/theory; trying to remember exactly how each of the layers joins and fits. Some students prefer to outline each course themselves, believing that is the best way to capture the flow and organization of the material. Others like to read and memorize prepared aids. A third school says you can sharpen your hold of the course by doing past exams. I've tried a little of each method and never found much difference between them. It's always the same slow accumulation of knowledge, the methodical job of putting that house up nail by nail. And when you get to the roof raising, when the course has really begun to fall together, with the term-long mysteries dissolving and the basic patterns becoming clearer and clearer, the study can seem as gratifying as it was boring in the rule-storing phase.

  In all stages, it was largely a personal project. When we got back from Christmas, it became apparent that Stephen and Terry and Aubrey and I were all thinking about the courses in slightly different ways. For that reason, study-group sessions were of limited use. We tried on a couple of occasions to get together, but the variations in the way we were preparing and in the progress each of us had made seemed mostly to disquiet us all. We each seemed to leave those meetings with the sensation that we were doing something wrong.

  Instead, we resorted to the telephone for sporadic consultations. Whenever there was an area I couldn't quite grasp or a line of reasoning I couldn't follow, I would call Stephen or Aubrey or Terry for advice, and they called me. I was on the phone with one of them between eight and a dozen times each day during the reading period. Inevitably, I got solid instruction from each of them, and some of the comforting I also needed on occasion.

  As the exams grew closer we were all becoming tense. My sleep was fitful and a nervous sensation was constantly in my gut. Looking back to the first of Nicky's practice tests, I could not help remembering that I had proven a capacity for screwing these things up.

  But the most emotionally telling factor was that persistent double bind which I still couldn't get away from: I badly wanted to succeed and I sorely feared failing. These abstract ideas raised far more powerful feelings in me than the mere prospect of getting As or Fs. Exams represented a kind of opening (or closing) world of opportunity--Law Review, clerkships, jobs, honor, prestige--and I both dearly hoped for and dreaded losing the chance at all of those things. There is a native desire, I guess, to avoid limitations.

  By the day before the Torts exam I was too keyed up to study much anymore. In the afternoon, I looked over a past exam. In the evening I called Stephen. He sounded as tense as me, though he was not willing to admit it.

  "Listen," he told me, "we've got a floor under ourselves. You've really got hold of the policy in this course, and the doctrine, and I have too. We're going to do okay. Other people just don't understand this stuff as well as we do. I was over in the Ed School library and for Chrissake, Ellie Winship is still trying to figure out what assumption of risk is. I feel really composed," he concluded, "I feel very calm."

  I did not. I paced and muttered and stared frozen at my notes until about ten o'clock, when I decided I should go to bed. The most important thing, I knew, was to get a good night's sleep. The exam would be at nine the next morning.

  During my first year of law school, my wife put up with a lot of excessive behavior from me. I worked too hard, slept too little. I was always up or down, at extremes. But Annette still thinks the night before the Torts exam was my least collected moment and I won't disagree.

  When I went to bed I took a sleeping pill, and after some thought about how nervous I was, a few milligrams of Valium. I was certain that would do the trick. At midnight, I was still awake. I got up and had a drink. It didn't seem to do much. A half hour later, I rose again to have more wine. This time Annette pulled herself out of bed to beg me not to drink again. I was going to kill myself with the pills and liquor, she said. I was going to be crazy with drugs in the morning. I went back to bed. We made love another time. Still no peace. At one-thirty, wild now with drugs and frustration, I rolled out and began to flail at the mattress: I was trying to destroy myself, I shouted; I was insuring failure. Annette quieted me and went to the living-room sofa so I could have the bed to myself. At two-thirty I got up to tell her to come back. She instructed me to go to sleep. Sometime after three, I finally did.

  At around six-thirty Annette came in to dress for school and I woke to her stirrings. She kissed me good-bye and wished me good luck and then I got up. I felt horrible. I'd had about three hours' sleep and now the sedatives had taken hold. I was cloudy and numb. My eyes ached and itched as if I'd tucked brambles under each lid. I poured five or six cups of coffee into myself, then, at eight, set off for school. I took my backpack full of books, a thermos of coffee, and my electric typewriter. I was still dizzy and spaced out as I rode down Massachusetts Avenue on the bus, and I thought vaguely that I was doomed.

  At HLS students can either handwrite or type their exams. There are separate rooms set aside for each method. I chose to type, because I do all my writing on the machine and feel comfortable in front of it. But the typing room was one of the old classrooms in Langdell, and I realized when Igot there that the clatter from thirty or forty machines in a room without carpet was going to be something terrific. I was still too bleary to be overly concerned, but I was grateful when Terry showed up with earplugs for both of us. It was real generosity on his part, not only because he'd thought of me, but also because the tests were being distributed as he arrived and he'd still taken the time to bring the plugs over.

  I thanked him and asked how he was.

  "Scared," he answered. "I was on the. can all night, man. No sleep."

  "Me neither," I said. I wished him good luck, then turned to the exam pamphlet which the proctor had just handed me. I read the questions. The first was a straight issue spotter. An M. D. had given a patient a drug still in experimental stages and the series of disasters you come to expect in a Torts course had followed: blindness, car crashes, paralysis--the world, in general, falling apart. We were asked what torts had occurred. The second question was wide open. It was another kind of issue-spotting narrative about a gardener and a tree falling on a neighbor's house, but we were instructed to emphasize theory and policy in our answer. The final question cited three well-known cases of nuisance law and asked for an essay about them.

  We had four hours.

  What had never quite struck home with me about a law exam was the importance of time. I had realized that we would be tested over a few hours on a knowledge which had taken months to acquire. And I'd looked at past exams. But I'd never really tried to write out an answer. It was only now that I saw that there was not a quarter of the time I'd need to frame a reasonably thorough response. The questions themselves covered four single-spaced pages and even after reading them twice I knew I hadn't recognized half of what was there. As it was, I couldn't figure out how I'd ever write down all of what I had seen. It was all split-second reaction, instantaneous stuff; there'd be no deep contemplation.

  I was hit at once with a powerful jolt of adrenaline. It made little difference that I'd felt detached from my body when I'd entered that room. By the time I'd finished reading
the questions, I was hopping. My heart started when I heard the first key strike on somebody else's typewriter, but after that, the incredible clatter of forty machines became as vague to me as Muzak. For the most part, I was lost those four hours in the oblivion of the adrenal rush. The promise of an "open book" test proved illusory, as I'd expected. I looked at my casebook for an instant, but that was mostly for comfort; I barely flipped the cover open and shut. There was no time. Proverbial wisdom is to spend at least a third of the exam period planning your answers and I tried to do that. But with my body jumping, I tended to just empty my head. I spent too long on the first question, as it was, and was typing after that in a mad fury.

  When time was called, I had written nearly twelve pages. Even as I stapled the sheets and handed them to the proctor, I knew I had made some gruesome errors. But I was exhilarated. I was sure I had passed. The first law-school exam. I was going to make it.

  Terry took me out to lunch in celebration, then drove me home. I slept the afternoon. At five, I got up to begin studying criminal law.

  I could not pump myself up the same way for the Criminal test two days off. By the next morning I was a little depressed about the mistakes I'd made on the Torts exam, more of which seemed to occur to me on the hour. It was not that I felt that I'd done poorly; I just realized that I'd missed the chance to do very well. Nor did I feel any of the sharpening effects of first-time apprehensions. I'd seen the monster now.

  "They'll never have us that way again," Stephen said when I spoke to him. Aubrey and Terry expressed similar sentiments. We were all more relaxed, even a little somber. There were fewer of those brainstorms by phone.

  Finally, the procedure for the Criminal test made it seem less forbidding. It would be taken in the more comfortable setting of home, and although it would cover no more material than the Torts exam, the test would last eight hours, not four. The eight-hour exam is a relative innovation at HLS. It's designed to ease some of the overwhelming time pressure of the traditional exam. Many professors are sniffish about take-homes. They feel that they do not provide the same stiff trial of mental agility as tests in the classroom. On the other side, there are more than a few students who feel that having twice the time just means doubling the agony. But I found it gratifying to know that I'd have a while to think.

  I studied almost lethargically, sifting through the huge outline--it was over 400 pages--which we'd put together. Most of the pre-Christmas work seemed now to have been purposeless. Time and Torts had pushed almost all of it out of my head and I made a note to myself to avoid getting enmeshed in that kind of project in the spring. I had to cram everything back in again.

  On Sunday night, I had no trouble sleeping. Annette, who'd been snowed out of school, drove me home after I'd picked up the exam Monday morning. I looked the test through while in the car. Because of the nature of the material, the narratives in Crim tests are often burlesques. They frequently read like parodies of the last act of Hamlet, with people being murdered all over the stage. But this one was down-to-earth, realistic, about a prostitution and theft ring of the kind of which there must be a dozen in every large city. The exam described the apprehension of the ring's members through the use of police decoys and a bugging. We were instructed to act as assistant district attorneys assigned to write a memo listing possible charges against those arrested and evaluating the admissibility of each piece of evidence which had been gathered.

  At home I worked the first few hours in the same kind of listless way I'd studied. I paged through the Model Penal Code, looking up crimes--waiting, I guess, for things to fall into place. They didn't; and at about 11:30, I panicked. I'd wasted more than a quarter of the time and I was sure--positive--that now I really would fail. The adrenaline came then, but for some reason it was too much. My body overdid it. I turned white, and crazy things seemed to go on inside my chest. I had a peculiar kind of arthritic reaction, maybe just because the rush lasted so long, and the joints throughout my body became too painful for me to work sitting down. I had to write on my feet, but I finished in time, getting back to school through the snow and the rush-hour traffic on schedule.

  Afterwards, we tried to celebrate. Annette and I went out with Terry and Aubrey and their wives, Donna and Arlene. Aubrey drank a vodka Gibson, then a bottle of Beaujolais and three or four beers. I also got roaring. But exams and that amazing wash of panic had left me limp.

  When I got home I made a note in my journal:

  I feel rotten. I feel wasted. I have finished my first term at the law.

  In the aftermath of exams, I felt bitter and cheated. After the long buildup, some kind of letdown was probably inevitable. And in part, my disappointment really had little to do with the tests themselves. In reviewing, I'd seen how much of my elaborate daily preparation for classes had not been worthwhile. The finest points of the cases, which I'd stayed up to all hours struggling to comprehend, were not merely irrelevant to the exams, but had also proved to be beyond the grasp of my memory. I promised myself not to be as relentless in the term ahead.

  Yet even granting that I was victim of my own excesses, there were other aspects of exams which for me took a relish out of law school that was never quite restored. All along, 2Ls and 3Ls had told me that I'd never been through anything like a law exam, and they were right. But that did nothing to enhance my respect for the tests. I felt insulted by them--there's no other way to put it. Finals were regarded with an institutional earnestness which had left my classmates and me believing for months that the tests would offer some consummate evaluation, not simply of how well we'd learned, but--almost mystically--of the depths of our capacity in the law. Exams were something to point to, a proving ground for all the hard and sincere labor. And instead they had been intellectual quick-draw contests, frantic exercises that seemed to place no premium on the sustained insight and imagination which I most admired in others, and when they occurred, felt proudest of in myself.

  When I returned to school, I found that most of my classmates seemed to share my feelings. People were incredulous now that these peculiar, limited instruments would be the sole basis for our grades. Reports of the haphazard way professors marked finals--comparing the papers against a checklist of salient points, giving no more than a few minutes to each test--only heightened the sense of injustice and frustration. And there was another group who continued grieving over errors. We'd all made mistakes, grand-style blunders and omissions. It's natural in the midst of that furious rushing. There is no such thing as a perfect law exam. Chris Henley told me later that touching on about sixty percent of the possible issues is often enough for an A. But some people could not be convinced that lapses were expected, and walked around for weeks making wan jokes about having their bags packed.

  Distress over law exams is nothing new. The student outcry for reform, for the opportunity to be evaluated through papers as well as tests, or by way of more frequent and less charged examinations, has been heard for years, and has in large part been rebuffed. Some faculty members frankly admit that they prefer not to spend the additional time that the alternative systems would require. Students sometimes suspect there are other reasons for the faculty's resistance to change. The professors are persons who did quite well on exams; in fact, they all owe much of their present position to that success. It is difficult at moments not to see them as merely perpetuating the regime on which they base their sense of authority and self-esteem.

  Tom Blaustein offered a limited defense of exams when I told him how angered I had been by the whole process. He admitted that he preferred to get papers from his students and that traditional law exams hardly measured the full range of qualities important in a good attorney.

  "But over the long haul," Tom said, "they do give you some reading on the way your mind works in certain situations--one skill. And if you're making a career choice--or if someone is making decisions about you--it's better to know that than nothing at all."

  Maybe. Even conceding Tom's point, I'm s
till not sure that that one quality should be allowed to determine so much of who gets what jobs, who teaches, who clerks, who gets the Law Review's training in legal scholarship. But the truth is that exams have so dominated my year as a law student that I have no objectivity about them. We'll all end up as lawyers anyway, entering a world of fine opportunities, and in the end I've tried to write off exams as a quaint professional custom, another rite of passage for a novice.

  But one thing nags which does not bear directly on me anymore, but is worth mention. Right now admissions at most American law schools are based on predictions of how well applicants will do in school, which is to say how high they will rank on exams. Those forecasts, based on statistical formulae that combine LSAT scores and college grades, are often quite accurate. But that amounts only to saying that American law schools admit people who will be good test-takers rather than good attorneys. Correlations between exam success and worthwhile achievements in the practice of law are speculative at best. Until that connection is better established, the narrow and arbitrary nature of exams will continue to dictate a narrow and arbitrary means of selection for training for the bar. And that is a peculiar state of affairs for a profession and an education which claim to concern themselves with rationality and fairness.

  FEBRUARY AND MARCH

  Getting By

  1/19/76 (Monday)

  At 1 1/2 L now. The second term begins. Boredom where there once was trepidation. Devices where there once was energy. I have resolved to brief no cases this term. I want to conserve time to read a newspaper now and then, and even on occasion, a novel.